Lifetime savings need to be for a lifetime, with pensions that last into your eighties or nineties.

The recent scandals serve to highlight a bigger issue: the individual responsibility that people now bear for their lifetime savings.

Many of them are realising that most of their lifetime savings are tied up in homes or pensions.

Now, lest all this sound somewhat academic, consider the fact that many backward-looking company pension funds - where your lifetime savings are probably invested - hold more bonds than ever before.

The money lost to policyholders represents our lifetime savings.